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He said otherwise he was afraid to leave Puna Punou with such a scoundrel loose, and threatened to write to Sydney for a man-of-war. But Maunga the king was a saphead and a coward, and he couldn't see it Coe's way at all; and not having the sense to keep his mouth shut, what does he do but traipse around the settlement, telling everybody what the captain said and wanted.
A regular bad lot, and, like every big scalawag, every little scalawag had to tail along with him, too, for company and mutual protection; so his houses was the kind of Bowery of Puna Punou, with the whalers going to him to buy girls, and all that.
Like all the chiefs of Puna Punou, Afiola was a tall, fine-looking man, very vigorous, lordly, and pleasant spoken, and if it weren't for his pock-marked face and the wickedest eyes I ever saw in a man's head, you would have said he was a perfect gentleman, and handsome, as Kanakas go.
The next day he called in state, with the skull of a shark in a silk handkerchief, and a man carrying a crate of onions. Oh, it may sound common to you, but it's like sending flowers to your lady-love in Puna Punou, and I've seen a year pass without the sight of one!
Puna Punou lies in 14th South exactly, though the writer keeps back the longitood for reasons that will soon be understood by the gentle reader if the gentle reader is patient and won't skip.
Well, for a time it was, Coe slipping out at dawn on the ebb with a cargo of Afiola rapscallions he was to drop, one here, one there, all around the Group, we having no further use for them in Puna Punou. The measles struck us shortly afterwards in a Tahiti bark, and it carried off a sight of people, Afiola included, who was in a sort of armed hiding on the other side of the island.
I guess he thought he'd wind up by pulling off the biggest thing yet, for he had a kind of pride of wickedness in him, and gloried in being the bad man of Puna Punou. He wanted to top it all now, and do something that tremendous that it would shake the whole island from Fale a Lupo to Diamond Rock. Anyway, whatever he thought or didn't think, what he did was to waylay Mrs.
In every community there's some fellar who's at the root of all the mischief that happens, so that if anybody gets speared of a dark night, or a girl is missing from home, you know just where to look for who done it. In Puna Punou you looked for Afiola, and the chances were you'd find him drunk on orange beer and laying for trouble with a gun.
Not that there is any buried treasure there, or any foolishness of that kind; it's girls mostly, and pearl shell and cocoanuts, that Puna Punou produces, and you don't need no chart with red crosses from my dying hands to find any of them. But Mrs. Tweedie is still alive, and likewise Elijah Coe, and I'd be acting like the son of a sea cook if I did a hand's turn to hurt either.
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